About Project

World-over, technology mediated violence against women is growing to be a serious social problem. Women’s full and free participation in digital spaces presupposes a safe online environment, but going online seem to be fraught with the risk of violence for women. Governments, especially in countries in the global South, are yet to bring their laws and institutions up-to-speed, to effectively respond to this issue.

Against this backdrop, IT for Change and the Women’s Rights Online network of the WWW Foundation initiated ‘Online freedom for all = No unfreedom for women’, a project that intends to trigger national-level policy dialogues on balancing the right to free speech online with women’s right to freedom from technology-mediated violence, in India and Bangladesh. The project, launched in January 2017, seeks to address key gaps in existing legal-institutional frameworks on technology-mediated violence against women in the two countries.